Omnibus.The.Sea.Witch.2012 Read online

  Modahl looked with binoculars. “It’s a sub conning tower. About six miles. Running southeast, I think. We’re in his stern quarter.”

  He banked the plane steeply right, then disengaged the autopilot and lifted the nose and added power. “We’ll climb,” he said. “Make a diving attack down the moonpath.”

  “Going to drop a bomb?”

  “One, I think. There may be nothing at Buka or Rabaul.”

  He explained what he wanted to the crew over the intercom. “We’ll use the guns on the conning tower,” he said, “then drop the bomb as we go over. You guys in the blisters and tunnel, hit ‘em with all you got as we go by. They’ll go under before we can make another run, so let’s make this one count.”

  Everyone put on life vests, just in case.

  “Your job,” Modahl said to me, “is to watch the altimeter and keep me from flying into the water. I want an altitude callout every ten seconds or so. Not every hundred feet, but every ten seconds.”

  “Yessir.”

  He called Hoffman to the cockpit and talked to him. “One bomb, the call will be ‘ready, ready, now.’ I’ll pickle it off, but to make sure it goes, I want you to push your pickle when I do.”

  “Aye aye, sir.”

  MODAHL:

  The theory was simple enough: We were climbing to about twenty-five hundred feet, if I could get that high under those patchy clouds, then we would fly down the moonpath toward that sub. We’d see him, but he couldn’t see us. At two miles I’d chop the throttles and dive. If everything went right, we’d be doing almost 250 mph when we passed three hundred feet in altitude, about a thousand feet from the sub, and I opened fire with the nose fifties.

  I planned to pull out right over the conning tower and release the bomb. If I judged it right and the bomb didn’t hang up on the rack, maybe it would hit close enough to the sub to damage its hull.

  On pullout the guys in the back would sting the sub with their fifties.

  Getting it all together would be the trick.

  HOFFMAN:

  I opened the hatch on the bow turret and climbed astraddle of those fifties. I patted those babies. I’d cleaned and greased and loaded them—if they jammed when we needed them Modahl would be royally pissed. Dutch Amme, the crew chief, would sign me up for a strangulation. Modahl was a nice enough guy, for an officer, but he and Amme wouldn’t tolerate a fuck-up at a time like this, which was okay by me. None of us came all this way to wave at the bastards as we flew by.

  The guns would work—I knew they would.

  POTTINGER:

  We know the Japanese sailors are there—they are blissfully unaware of us up here in the darkness. Right now they have their sub on the surface, recharging batteries and running southeast, probably headed for the area off Guadalcanal … to hunt for American ships. When they find one, they will torpedo it from ambush.

  We call it war but it’s really murder, isn’t it? Us or them, whoever pulls the trigger, no matter. The object of the game is to assassinate the other guy before he can do it to you.

  We’re like Al Capone’s enforcers, out to whack the enemy unawares. For the greater glory of our side.

  Modahl climbed to the west, with the moon at his back. He got to twenty-four hundred feet before he tickled the bottom of a cloud, so he stayed there and got us back to cruising speed before he started his turn to the left. He turned about 160 degrees, let me fly the Witch while he used the binoculars.

  “We’ve got it again,” the radioman said. “Thirty degrees left, right at the limits of the gimbals.”

  “Range?”

  “Twelve miles.”

  “Come left ten,” Modahl told me.

  I concentrated fiercely on the instruments, holding altitude and turning to the heading he wanted. The Catalina was heavy on the controls, but not outrageously so. I’d call it lots of stability.

  The seconds crept by. All the tiredness that I had felt just minutes before was gone. I was ready.

  “I’ve got it,” he said flatly, staring through the binoculars. “Turn up the moonpath.”

  I did so.

  “Okay, everybody. Range about eight miles. Three minutes, then we dive to attack.”

  I tried to look over the nose, which was difficult in a Catalina.

  “Still heading southeast,” Modahl murmured. “You’ll have to turn slightly right to keep it in the moonpath.”

  The turn also moved the nose so it wouldn’t obstruct Modahl’s vision.

  Maybe I shouldn’t have, but I wondered about those guys on that sub. If we pulled this off, these were their last few minutes of life. I guess few of us ever know when the end is near. Which is good, I suppose, since we all have to die.

  The final seconds ticked away, then Modahl laid down the binoculars and reached for the controls. He secured the autopilot, and told me, “I’m going to run the trim full nose down. As we come off target, your job is to start cranking the trim back or I’ll never be able to hold the nose up as our speed drops.”

  “Okay.”

  He retarded the throttles a little, then advanced the props to the stops so they wouldn’t act as dive brakes. Still, nose down as we were, we began to accelerate. Modahl ran the trim wheel forward. I called altitudes.

  “Two thousand … nineteen hundred … eighteen …”

  Glancing up, I saw the conning tower of the sub and the wake it made. I must have expected it to look larger, because the fact that it was so tiny surprised me.

  “Twelve … eleven …”

  The airspeed needle crept past 200 mph. We were diving for a spot just short of the sub so Modahl could raise the nose slightly and hammer them, then pull up to avoid crashing.

  I could see the tower plainly now in the reflection of the moonlight, which made a long white ribbon of the wake.

  “Six hundred … five … four-twenty-five …”

  We were up to almost 250 mph, and Modahl was flattening his dive, from about twenty degrees nose down to fifteen or sixteen. He had the tower of that sub bore-sighted now.

  “Three-fifty …”

  “Three hundred …”

  “Ready,” Modahl said for Varitek’s benefit. He shoved the throttles full forward.

  “Two-fifty …”

  Modahl jabbed the red button on the yoke with his right thumb. Even with the shielding the blast tubes provided, the muzzle flashes were so bright that I almost visually lost the sub. The engines at full power were stupendously loud, but the jackhammer pounding just inches from my feet made the cockpit floor tremble like a leaf in a gale.

  HOFFMAN:

  I could see the sub’s tower, see how we were hurtling through the darkness toward that little metal thing amid the swells. When the guns beneath me suddenly began hammering, the noise almost deafened me. I was expecting it, and yet, I wasn’t.

  I had been pointing the thirty at the Jap, now I held the trigger down.

  The noise and heat and gas from the cycling breechblocks made it almost impossible to breathe. This was the fourth time I had done this, and it wasn’t getting any better. I could scarcely breathe, the noise was off the scale, my flesh and bones vibrated. The burlap under me insulated me from the worst of the heat, yet if Modahl kept the triggers down, he was going to fry me. I was sitting on hellfire.

  And I was screaming with joy … Despite everything, the experience was sublime.

  “One hundred.” I shouted the altitude over the bedlam. Some fool was screaming on the intercom, the engines were roaring at full power, the guns in the nose were hammering in one long, continuous burst … I had assumed that Modahl would pull out at a hundred. He didn’t.

  “Readeee …”

  “Fifty feet,” I shouted over the din, trying to make myself heard. I reached for the yoke.

  “Now!” Modahl roared, pushing the bomb release with his left thumb, releasing the gun trigger, and pulling the yoke back into his stomach all at the same time.

  I began cranking madly on the trim.

&n
bsp; We must have taken the lenses off the periscopes with our keel. I distinctly felt us hit something … and the nose was rising through the horizontal, up, up, five degrees, ten, as the guns in the blisters and tunnel got off long rolling bursts. When they fell silent our airspeed was bleeding off rapidly, so Modahl pushed forward on the yoke.

  “Hoffman, you asshole, did the bomb go?”

  “No, sir. It didn’t release.”

  “You shit. You silly, silly shit.”

  “Mr. Modahl—”

  “Get your miserable ass up here and talk to me, Hoffman.”

  He cranked the plane around as tightly as he could, but too late. When we got level, inbound, with the moon in front of us, the sub was no longer there. She had dived.

  “You fly it,” Modahl said disgustedly, and turned the plane over to me.

  Hoffman climbed up to stand behind the pilots’ seats while Modahl inspected the hung bomb with an Aldis lamp. I tried not to look at the bright light so as to maintain some night vision—the light got me anyway. When Modahl had inspected the offending bomb to his satisfaction and finally killed the light, I was half-blinded.

  Hoffman said, “Maybe we got the sub with the guns.”

  Modahl’s lip curled in a vicious sneer, and he turned in his seat, looked at Hoffman as if he were a piece of shit.

  “Which side are you on, Hoffman? Your shipmates risked their lives to get that bomb on target, to no avail. If that bomb comes off the rack armed while we’re landing, the Japs win and our happy little band of heroes will go to hell together. I don’t care if you have to grease those racks with your own blood. When we make an attack they goddamn well better work.”

  Hoffman still had pimples. When Modahl killed the Aldis lamp I could see them, red and angry, in the glow of the cockpit lights.

  “Are you fucking crazy?” Modahl asked without bothering to turn around.

  “No, sir,” Hoffman stammered.

  “Screaming on the intercom during an attack. Jesus! I oughta court-martial your silly ass.”

  “I’m sorry, sir. It just slipped out. Everything was so loud and—”

  Modahl made a gesture, as if he were shooing a fly. But that wasn’t the end of it. “Chief Amme,” Modahl said on the intercom. “When we get back, I expect you and Hoffman to run the racks through at least a dozen cycles on each bomb station. I want a written report signed by you and Hoffman that the racks work perfectly.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Pottinger, bring your chart to the cockpit. Let’s figure out where we are and where the hell we go from here.”

  I was still hand-flying the plane, so Modahl said to me, “Head northwest and climb to four thousand, just in case we are closer to Bougainville than I think we are. We’ll circle around the northern tip of the island and approach the harbor up the moonpath.”

  Modahl took off his headset and leaned toward me. “Hoffman’s getting his rocks off down there.”

  “Maybe he’s crazy, too,” I suggested.

  “We all are,” Modahl said flatly, and nodded once, sharply. His lips turned down in a frown.

  I dropped the subject.

  “When you get tired, we’ll let Otto fly the Witch.” Otto was the autopilot. After a few minutes I nodded, and he engaged it.

  MODAHL:

  Of course Hoffman was crazy. We all were to be out here at night in a flying boat hunting Japs in the world’s biggest ocean. Yeah, sure, the Navy sent us here, but every one of us had the wit to have wrangled a nice cushy job somewhere in the States while someone else did the sweating.

  It’s addictive, like booze and tobacco. I just worried that I’d love it too much. And it’s probably a sin. Not that I know much about sin … but I can feel the wrongness of it, the evil. That’s the attraction, I guess. I liked the adrenaline and the risk and the feeling of … power. Liked it too much.

  It was two o’clock in the morning when we approached Buka harbor from the sea. Jungle-covered hills surrounded the harbor on two sides. A low spit formed the third side. On the end of the spit stood a small lighthouse. In the moonlight we could see that the harbor was empty. Not a single ship.

  Pottinger was standing behind us. “How long up to Rabaul?” Modahl asked.

  “An hour and forty-five minutes or so. Depends on how cute you want to be on the approach.”

  “You know me. I try to be cute enough to stay alive.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Before we go, let’s wake up the Japs in Buka. Why should they get a good night’s sleep if we can’t?”

  “Think the Japs are still here?”

  “You can bet your soul on it.”

  Modahl pointed out where the town lay, on the inland side of the harbor. It was completely blacked out, of course.

  We made a large, lazy circle while the guys in back readied the parafrags. We would drop them out the tunnel while we flew over the town … they fell for a bit, then the parachutes opened, and they drifted unpredictably. This was a nonprecision attack if there ever was one. It was better than throwing bricks, though not by much.

  We flew toward the town at three thousand feet. We were still a mile or so away when antiaircraft tracers began rising out of the darkness around the harbor. The streams of shells went up through our altitude, all right, so they had plenty of gun. They just didn’t know where in the darkness we were. The streams waved randomly as the Japs fired burst after burst.

  It looked harmless enough, though it wasn’t. A shell fired randomly can kill you just as dead as an aimed one if it hits you.

  “One minute,” Modahl told the guys in back. He directed his next comment at me: “I’m saving the five-hundred-pounders for Rabaul. Surely we’ll find a ship there or someplace.”

  “Thirty seconds.”

  We were in the tracers now, which bore a slight resemblance to Fourth of July fireworks.

  “Drop ‘em.”

  One tracer stream ignited just ahead of us and rose toward us. Modahl turned to avoid it. As I watched the glowing tracers I was well aware of how truly large the Catalina was, a black duraluminum cloud. How could they not hit it?

  “That’s the last of them.” The word from the guys in back came as we passed out of the last of the tracers. The last few bombs would probably land in the jungle. Oh well.

  We turned for the open sea. We were well away from the city when the frags begin exploding. They marched along through the blackness, popping very nicely as every gun in town fell silent.

  “Rabaul,” Modahl said, and turned the plane over to me.

  FOUR

  Rabaul!

  The place was a legend. Although reputedly not as tough a nut as Truk, the big Jap base in the Carolines, Rabaul was the major Japanese stronghold in the South Pacific. Intelligence said they had several hundred planes—bombers, fighters, float fighters, seaplanes—and from thirty to fifty warships. This concentration of military power was defended with an impressive array of antiaircraft weapons.

  The Army Air Corps was bombing Rabaul by day with B-17s, and the Navy was harassing them at night with Catalinas. None of these punches were going to knock them out, but if each blow hurt them a little, drew a little blood, the effect would be cumulative. Or so said the staff experts in Washington and Pearl.

  Regardless of whatever else they might be, the Japanese were good soldiers, competent, capable, and ruthless. They probably had bagged Joe Snyder and his crew last night, and tonight, with this moon, they surely knew the Americans were coming.

  I wondered if Snyder had attacked Rabaul before he headed for Buka, or vice versa. Whichever, the Japs in Buka probably radioed the news of our 2 A.M. raid to Ra-baul. The guys in Rabaul knew how far it was between the two ports, and they had watches. They could probably predict within five minutes when we were going to arrive for the party.

  I didn’t remark on any of this to Modahl as we flew over the empty moonlit sea; he knew the facts as well as I and could draw his own conclusions. At least the clouds were dissipa
ting. The stars were awe-inspiring.

  Pottinger came up to the cockpit with his chart and huddled over it with Modahl. I sat watching the moon-path and monitoring Otto. I figured if Modahl wanted to include me in the strategy session, he would say so. My watch said almost three in the morning. We couldn’t get there before four, so we were going to strike within an hour of dawn.

  Finally, Modahl held the chart where I could see it, and said, “Here’s Rabaul, on the northern coast of New Britain. This peninsula sticking out into the channel forms the western side of the harbor, which is a fine one. There are serious mountains on New Britain and on New Ireland, the island to the north and east. The highest is over seventy-five hundred feet high, so we want to avoid those.

  “Here is what I want to do. We’ll motor up the channel between the islands until we get on the moonpath; at this hour of the morning that will make our run in heading a little south of west. Then we’ll go in. As luck would have it, that course brings us in over the mouth of the harbor.

  “They’ll figure we want to do that, but that’s the only way I know actually to see what’s there. The radar will just show us a bunch of blips that could be anything. If we see a ship we like, we’ll climb, then do a diving attack with the engines at idle. Bomb at masthead height. What do you think?”

  “Think we’ll catch ‘em asleep?”

  He glanced at me, then dropped his eyes. “No.”

  “It’ll be risky.”

  “We’ll hit the biggest ship in there, whatever that is.”

  “Five-hundred-pounders won’t sink a cruiser.”

  “The tender was out of thousand-pounders. Snyder took the last one.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “We can cripple ‘em, put a cruiser out of the war for a while. Maybe they’ll send it back to Japan for repairs. That’ll do.”

  “How about a destroyer? Five hundred pounds of tor-pex will blow a Jap can in half.”

  “They got lots of destroyers. Not so many cruisers.”

  He thought like I did: If there was a cruiser in there, the Japs knew it was the prime target and they’d be ready; still, that’s the one I’d hit. When you’re looking for a fight, hit the biggest guy in the bar.